In the Turkey Breeding Factory

By Frank Observer

A friend heard an advertisement on the local radio about the
Butterball Turkey Company needing workers in artificial
insemination, called "AI" for short. So I went to the personnel
office across the street from the turkey killing plant in this
small midwestern town. Latinos, Asians and poor whites filled the
waiting room. Everybody wore rubber boots and big, puffy white
hairnets--both men and women.

"Bob," the AI boss, explained that the modern turkey
business is about the "most high-technical" of all the animal
operations. "The turkey is a creation of modern science and
industry," he said. "It's been out of the wild only about 1OO
years, the last animal to be domesticated. Because of that
wildness, it tends to go 'broody,' which means it lays a few eggs
once a year and quits. We have to trick it into laying all the
time."

Bob told me that the company's birds are much bigger and
more clumsy than the original turkey--so much so that they can't
breed by themselves anymore. So the company has to use AI to
produce the fertile eggs that hatch the chicks that then go into
"grow-out" houses and grow up to be slaughtered and processed.

The Butterball Turkey Company is a division of ConAgra
Turkey Co., a division of ConAgra Poultry Co., a division of
ConAgra, Inc. of Omaha, NE--the agribusiness conglomerate.

They hired me. I reported for work at 4:45 AM. I was told to
go with "Joe" and his crew. Joe grunted at me, then barked,
"follow me in your car." Down a gravel road, the lights of a
turkey building glowed ahead. We parked. Joe handed me a dust
mask and grunted something. When I didn't move, he yelled, "Get
ahold of this and help me take it in." It was the insemination
machine, about the size of a TV set. As we walked toward the
building, a worker came out and pitched two dead birds out the
door.

Inside the building, I saw a sea of white hens. (3,OOO I was
told later.) The flock was divided in half by a double row of
metal "nests" down the middle of the building. From these nests,
a row of conveyer belts carried eggs.

Joe did not explain the work to come, nor did he introduce
me to the other crew members--all silent, surly-looking white men
in their 2Os. They set up the AI machine quickly and went to
work.

Two men herded birds--a hundred or so at a time--into a
makeshift pen along one side of the house. From there, these
"drivers" forced 5-6 birds at a time into a chute, which opened
onto a 5 X 5-foot concrete-lined pit sunken into the floor of the
house. Three men worked belly-deep in the pit: Two grabbed birds
from the chute and held them for the third, Joe, the inseminator.

They put me to work first in the pit, grabbing and
"breaking" hens. One "breaks" a hen by holding her breast down,
legs down, tail up so that her cloaca or "vent" opens. This makes
it easier for the inseminator to insert the tub and deliver a
"shot" of semen.

"Breaking" hens was hard, fast, dirty work. I had to reach
into the chute, grab a hen by the legs, and hold her--ankles
crossed--in one hand. Then, as I held her on the edge of the pit,
I wiped my other hand over her rear, which pushed up her tail
feathers and exposed her vent opening. The birds weighed 20 to 30
lbs., were terrified, and beat their wings and struggled in
panic. They were very strong and hard to hold.

With the hen thus "broken," the inseminator stuck his thumb
right under her vent and pushed, which opened the vent and forced
the end of the oviduct a bit. Into this, he inserted the semen
tube and released the semen. Then both men let go and the hen
flopped away onto the house floor.

The insemination machine's job was to put a calibrated
amount of semen into small, plastic "straws" for the inseminator.
Each straw was about the size of a drinking straw 3-4 inches
long. The machine drew semen from a 6 cc. syringe and loaded the
straws one at a time. With the tip of a rubber hose, the
inseminator took a straw, inserted it in the hen, and gave her a
"shot." Routinely, rhythmically, like a well-oiled machine, the
breakers and the inseminator did this over and over, bird by
bird, until all birds in the house had run through this gauntlet.

The semen came from the "tom house" where the males are
housed. Here "Bill" extracted the semen bird by bird. He worked
on a bench which has a vacuum pump and a rubber-padded clamp to
hold the tom by the legs. From the vacuum pump, a small rubber
hose ran to a "handset." With it, Bill "milked" each tom. The
handset was fitted with glass tubes and a syringe body; it sucked
semen from the tom and poured it into a syringe body.

I helped Bill for a while. My job was to catch a tom by the
legs, hold him upside down, lift him by the legs and one wing,
and set him up on the bench on his chest/neck, with his rear-end
sticking up facing Bill. He took each tom, locked his crossed
feet and legs into the padded clamp, then lifted his leg over the
bird's head and neck to hold him. Bill had the handset on his
right hand. With his left hand, he squeezed the tom's vent until
it opened up and the white semen oozed forth. He held the sucking
end of a glass tube just below the opening and sucked up the few
drops of semen. It looked like half & half cream, white and
thick. We did this over and over, bird by bird, until the syringe
body filled up. Each syringe body was already loaded with a
couple of cubic centimeters of "extender," a watery, bluish
mixture of antibiotics and saline solution. As each syringe was
filled, I ran it over to the hen house and handed it to the
inseminator and crew.

Each tom house contained about 400 males, 20 to a pen.
The toms are milked once or twice a week until they are
about 64 weeks old (16 mo.), by which time they can weigh up to
80 lbs. The hens are inseminated usually once, sometimes twice a
week, for about a year. When these breeding birds reach the end
of their cycle, they are killed and turned into lunch meat, pot
pies, and pet food.

The insemination crew did 2 houses a day--6000 hens a day.
Figuring a 10-hour day, that's 600 hens per hour, ten a minute.
Two breakers did 10 hens a minute, or each breaker "broke" 5 hens
a minute--one hen every 12 seconds.

This pace pressured the drivers to keep a steady flow of
birds into the chute to supply the pit. Having been through this
week after week, the birds feared the chute and bulked and
huddled up. The drivers literally kicked them into the chute. The
idea seemed to be to terrify at least one bird, who squawked,
beat her wings in panic, and terrified the others in her group.
In this way the drivers created such pain and terror behind the
birds that it forced them to plunge ahead to the pain and terror
they knew to be in the chute and pit ahead.

The crews worked at this pace from 5 AM until 2 PM, when I
left. They had 2 more hours of work to finish off the second hen
house. That's 11 hours at a stretch with no formal breaks. No
morning breakfast, no lunch hour. The only breaks came by chance,
when a machine malfunctioned or when the semen syringes were slow
to come. At about 12 or 1, the bad-tempered Joe got suddenly
generous after yelling and barking orders all day, and bought
everyone a "sody." He was not our buddy, but our paternalistic
leader. We got to sit outside among the swarms of flies buzzing
over a pile of dead birds and drink cokes for 10 to 15 minutes
while Joe and another guy ran an errand.

I asked the least belligerent co-worker about the workload
and the pace, the no-breaks routine. He told me that the crews
are given 30 minutes off for lunch, but that his crew (under Big
Bad Joe) worked through this lunch break in order to get paid for
the time. These guys worked at this pace 10 to 12 hours straight
without a break or a bite to eat just to get another $3 on their
paycheck.

I put up with this for a day because I thought I might learn
lots of secret stuff from the crews. Fat chance. Nobody talked.
Nobody talked about anything. The few times I tried to make
conversation, all I got was surly, glowering looks and a grunt or
two.

I have never done such hard, fast, dirty, disgusting work in
my life. Ten hours of pushing birds, grabbing birds, wrestling
birds, jerking them upside down, pushing open their vents,
dodging their panic-blown excrement, breathing the dust stirred
up by terrified birds, ignoring verbal abuse from Joe and the
others on the crew--all of this without a break or a bite to eat
(not that I could have eaten anything amongst all this). Working
under these conditions week after week (Bill had been there for 4
years), these men had grown callous, rough, and brutal. Every
bird went through their merciless hands at least once a week,
week after week, until they were loaded up to be killed.